Thank you for the input! @Gustavo, I will admit that it has taken a little bit to get the hang of the difference between CSOS and Getting to Blinky or Shine On. It has required me to take a bit more time to work through each of the videos and make sure that I followed on.
I will have to take a look at the Full Charge Ahead project once it has been fully migrated.
Current Progress: I’ve now worked through the point of finding the Op Amp and the LDO for CSOS.
The biggest challenge in this part of the project was that it looks like the project may be a couple of years old and the parts.io website has now become findchips.com which has a bit of different interface. This made it a bit hard to follow along. At this point I have gone through the process of searching for these two parts 3-4 times trying to get a handle on the methodology behind choosing a part.
Overview of the Project: I struggled a little bit in the first couple of videos to get a handle on what the end goal of the project was. The videos seemed to be referencing it as a part of a larger project. Once I got a handle on the fact that we were attempting to test battery cells it started making more sense and reviewing the Reload schematic definitely helped too.
I’m still a little confused as to what parameters we are testing on the batteries. Is it to determine run time, the voltage drop-off, or current capacity of the batteries?
Picking the Parts: The first time I did this was after the intro video and I used only the Digikey search tools. My biggest problem here was that I wasn’t sure what type of batteries or what configurations. I arbitrarily picked an 18650 cell setting the safe discharge voltage at 3.2V (The minimum discharge voltage was actually 3.0V but I left some safety factor because I don’t know much about lithium batteries). With this I landed on a TI TPS79330 voltage regulator and an MCP6241 Op-Amp. These would have worked fine with the 3.0V supply voltage but that would have made it hard to test most batteries.
After watching the video I ended up finding the findchips.com website and after jumping around through the video a few more times picked out what some of the key parameters were. Findchips works well but is a bit tricky to get results out of. You have to be careful what filters you use because some of them aren’t populated for every part and you can cut out a lot of potential choices by choosing one of these. Once I figured that out I got much better results.
For the LDO I ended up choosing a MIC5205 with a 2.5V fixed output. At this current it has a max dropout voltage of only 50mV. It also had a wide input range and potential to supply up to 150mA output current so if I order a few extras they will likely be usable in future projects.
For the Op-Amp I ended up going with the MCP6002. Which I realized later was the same one from the Reload project. It was widely available, capable of operating with a 2.5V supply. Part of this pick for me was again to choose something that I could order some extras of to use in future projects as well.
Next up choosing the rest of the components!